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2017 A Year in Review

Open Source Has made its entrance

In 2017 the financial services industry asked: What is open source and why does it matter? This interest in open source itself is a huge milestone for an industry filled with legal and regulatory hurdles. Not only was open source a topic of interest in 2017, but banks and FinTech start-ups took it a step further – realizing the benefits of collaboration, they began to embrace open source and integrate it into their core strategy and value proposition. Read Open Banking Starts with Opening Bank Culture and The Symphony Software Foundation: Bringing Open Source to Wall Street to hear more about these exciting changes.

This year was the year that the financial services industry not only acknowledged open source, but truly began to embrace it – and we are excited to keep the momentum rolling. Our goal is to make it easy for banks to open source by building a community, providing best practices and providing members with a secure and compliant way to open source.

Johan Sandersson, FactSet, accepting his All Working Group, No Play Award

Paul Teyssier leading the API Working Group Meeting

In addition to our members, we’ve built a huge online community and partner network over the past year which we will continue to embrace and engage in conversation with in 2018 and beyond.

Stellar Contributions

Our members are making great strides in open source contributions. In May, gold member, OpenFin open sourced its core technology under an Apache 2.0 licence in a project called Hadouken. Later, BNY Mellon open sourced its first project, CodeKatas, an important milestone for the financial services industry.

In Q4, Symphony Communications Services LLC announced two contributions to the Foundation including the libraries behind S2, their next generation microservices core platform as well as elements of its crypto libraries, adding almost 400,000 lines of code contributed to date!

Milestones

The Open Source Strategy Forum, the first of its kind: In November, we welcomed over 300 industry leaders from financial services, open source and enterprise software to establish a vision for open source collaboration in financial services. Attendees chose from over 30 sessions across four tracks including executive, legal, community, and technology. Speakers from JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, BNY Mellon and more discussed the why and how of open source engagement and how it will play a role in the future of fintech innovation. At the event, Deutsche Bank also announced the details of Plexus Interop, a major new open source contribution to the Foundation.

Figure 1 shows top-line project growth and maturity up to December 31st, 2017. As you can see, we continue to have solid growth in project count and perhaps more importantly, continued maturation of projects through the project lifecycle.

Figure 2 shows the project health chart. From this chart we can see that most of our larger projects are active, both in terms of recency of activity (X axis) and relative amount of activity (bubble size) - a good indicator of project health. It’s also interesting to observe the bimodal distribution in this graph - there is a clear clustering of larger, recently active, healthy projects to the right of the graph, and a scattering of smaller, inactive projects trailing to the left. While expected, it is gratifying to see this typical open source project portfolio pattern starting to form in our community.

The metrics system provides you with many valuable insights into the activity and momentum of the open source projects we host. If you’d like to see more Foundation systems included, or have a need for specific reports, please let us know!

Forward Thinking

In 2017 we made great strides in bringing open source to the forefront of financial services but we’ve got a long way to go! The new year will bring financial services even closer to unlocking the full potential of open source collaboration and our goal is to create a trusted, independent playing field for the industry to participate.